The Safe House in Cape Girardeau provides safe shelter, case management, a 24-hour crisis hotline and more for people experiencing domestic violence throughout Southeast Missouri.
Executive Director Kim Dixon recently sat down with shelter manager Robin Scott to talk about the barriers that often exist for their clients after they leave their abuser and are trying to restart their lives.
For the month of April, we’re focusing on the stories of those working to combat domestic and sexual violence in Missouri.
Kim Dixon: So, whenever somebody leaves the situation and say they come into our shelter, we're talking about, you know, making sure that they're safe, obviously.
Once they kind of get through that initial crisis moment, where they're starting to feel okay — our case manager will start to meet with them, kind of help them identify the goals that they might have, things that they want to work on.
They may have left all their medications behind, their personal identifying information, their IDs, their birth certificates — all that good stuff. We're going to start working on all of that.
They may start getting a job, start saving, all those things, and we're going to work with them like on their timeline. Kind of figure out what they want to do and just kind of be there to walk alongside them.
Robyn Scott: We are budgeting with them. We also have brought in banks to talk with them about how to budget because a lot of our clients don't even have bank accounts when they first come in here.
Everybody's journey can look so different, but we're all trying to get them to whatever they want their life to look like.
That's one of the first questions I ask them, “What do you want your life to look like?” And whatever it takes to get that person there, whatever it takes to connect them to area resources — we're going to do it.
And then that's where the transition piece comes in that I get so passionate about — the challenges we are facing with housing right now.
We are seeing landlords — and I understand it can be a risk for them — but they are having higher and higher standards of who they will rent to.
So, some of them want credit scores of 680 and above. Well, the woman or someone, anyone coming out of domestic violence where maybe their abuser took out loans in their name — that's going to be a huge obstacle.
We also have people who have felonies or violent offenses, drug offenses, and landlords have said, “No, I will not rent to people with those charges. I will not rent to people unless they have income three times the amount of rent.”
And to have income three times the amount of rent — when we're seeing rental prices going higher and higher — is almost impossible.
What is happening is these rental companies who have safe, secure and affordable housing, their requirements are unreachable for our clients.
And so, what then ends up happening is they are forced to rent from landlords who will rent to anyone, but they're going to rent it for an extremely high price.
